CityRealty's Top 10 Lists

New York City apartment buildings offer the best of everything: views, style, amenities, services, space, location, prestige...

CityRealty's residential architecture expert, Carter B. Horsley, has reviewed and compiled definitive Top 10 lists for every aspect of New York City apartment living and architecture. If you're looking for the right New York City apartment building with the best of something special you want in a home, or you just need to know who has the most spectacular rooftop decks in the city or the most incredible gargoyles, the CityRealty Top 10 lists let you know where it's at.

This list of pre-war NYC apartment buildings is the the la creme de la creme of luxury living. If you can manage a home in one of the opulent structures, what you'll get is very solid and quiet construction, crisp and prompt service, impeccable location, intriguing fellow residents, and an architectural masterpiece. All-in-all, a delectable, irresistible, urban stew.

The Top 10 New York City condo apartment buildings in the United Nations, and Sutton and Beekman Places neighborhoods are off the beaten path from Midtown but they have always attracted a steady and loyal clientele who enjoy waterfront views without sacrificing proximity to the restaurants and attractions of Midtown. The Trump World Tower became the city's tallest apartment building although it incurred the wrath of many residents for rising above the Secretariat Building of the United Nations. Many others curbed their height and slowly changed the area from pre-war low- and mid-rise apartments buildings to luxury apartment towers such as Three Ten at 310 East 53rd Street, 100 United Nations Plaza, the Mondrian at 250 West 54th Street, and The Collection at 441 East 57th Street.

Just suppose you had a gigantic, shiny, metallic sculpture by Jeff Koons. Where would you put it? Aerial photographers would tell you to find an extremely large penthouse terrace on Sutton Place to show off your prized art work to your higher neighbors. The penthouse at the Pierre Hotel has a very large ballroom but quite small corner terraces with huge urns not filled with oil to ward off assaults. For some, the lure of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon results in loggias and pergolas such as can be found at 1040 Fifth Avenue and 15 Central Park West.

Even in a post-Animal House-era, dormitories never get much respect. In New York City, however, they still conjure images of youths staggering, not silently, in the wee hours towards their miniscule apartments and numerous roommates off ever-expanding campuses. It's not that the student haunts are unattractive, or in off-the-beaten paths. Indeed, many have prime locations, close to the proverbial "action." It's just that the best of the Top 10 Back-To-College New York City apartment buildings might be too elegant/fragile for their temporary residents.

What good are spectacular penthouse views if you're on the second floor? Well, in New York City real estate they are cherished for generally increasing the building's fame as a place of envy. Democratic buildings with roof decks, of course, make communal fireworks observations a pleasant "ooh" ritual as unobstructed vistas are so rare in this ever-changing city that many New Yorkers are grateful just for a peek of sky. The perfect apartment, of course, could be the minaret-like parapet atop the Sherry Netherland with views of Fifth Avenue in midtown not obscured by its gigantic neighbor, the former General Motors Building across from the Plaza. Problem is, that parapet does not come with an apartment. But making do with the New York City apartment views that do indeed exist, we offer you this Top 10.

Rosario Candela (1890-1953) is the most famous architect of luxury apartment buildings in New York City, most of which were erected on Fifth and Park avenues before World War II. These buildings reek with good taste, better proportions, lavish expanses of limestone on the exterior and considerable square footage inside the apartments. Informal, open kitchens were not his thing. Most of his widely coveted buildings appear understated from the outside. Apartment layouts generally are grand and formal, especially in his Top 10 pre-World War II New York City apartment buildings with their foyers, galleries and fireplaces.

Emery Roth was the city's greatest architect of pre-war apartment buildings. While his contemporaries J. E. R. Carpenter and Rosario Candela offered lush layouts of their buildings on Fifth and Park Avenues making them the most desirable for the city's upper classes for decades, their exteriors were quite understated and conservative. The exteriors of Roth's buildings, on the other hand, were flamboyant and adventurous. Not only did he create romantic and very dramatic skyline structures such as the San Remo and the Beresford on Central Park West and the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue, Roth also experimented with great success with bold façade patterning such as the Ardsley on Central Park West. He also dabbled artfully in streamline Art Deco-style design at the El Dorado and 601 West End Avenue and could model historical revival styles with great finesse at 993 Fifth Avenue, 480 Park Avenue, 10 Sheridan Square and Southgate at 434 East 54th Street. Born in 1871, Roth died August 20, 1948.

Not surprisingly, all the buildings on this list are pre-war and most are limestone- rather than glass-clad and have rusticated bases. Fifth Avenue beats out Central Park West, four to three, trailed by two Park Avenue buildings and one facing the East River. These early buildings have true and large "luxury" layouts and they goggled up the great locations early.

Murray Hill used to be the sedate rather small residential neighborhood south of Grand Central Terminal and east of Fifth Avenue but in recent years it has expanded to the East River south of the United Nations complex with impressive and flashy new high-rise condos such as the Corinthian, the Horizon, and Manhattan Place, all clustered around the Queens Midtown Tunnel, while the west section sprouted snazzy new condo towers like 325 and 425 Fifth Avenue and 52 Park Avenue.

If you've got it, flaunt it, as the saying goes. These buildings are not necessarily the most fashionable nor the most expensive, but they are unquestionably special and their residents walk tall and proud even if they are not all Egyptians. When they get bored, they simply go to The Frick Collection to gaze at Gainsborough's coiffed ladies in a park for an instant cure.

Balconies are great for developers because they are not included in zoning calculations of what can be built and most residents consider them an important amenity for their sunbathing and gardening needs as well as communal esprit de corps: eyes on the street as Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planner who thought streets were more important than buildings, might have said. Some of the Top 10 balconies in New York City apartment buildings, of course, are frilly affairs where the Stellas of the world can hear their name yelled out from the gutter. Glass balconies are not for vertigo-prone denizens, of course, but balconies that have been enclosed fully in glass have ruined the architectural purity of those that were built open. Whereforth are the romantic balconies of yore, you might ask. Try the ship's prow corner balconies at 100 United Nations Plaza, or the angled protrusions at The Future at 200 East 32nd Street.

Battery Park City, created with the excavated dirt from the World Trade Center site, is a 92-acre extension of Lower Manhattan into the Hudson River. It is notable for the World Financial Center and its great Wintergarden facing a large yacht marina, designed by Cesar Pelli, and its mix and mid- and high-rise residential buildings, both rental and condo, and its lovely esplanade along the river.

Art Deco style encapsulates many different elements. It takes cues from aerodynamics and machinery, bold patterning, sinuous curves and shiny metals. It is just plain sexy. It also has a Busby Berkley, hat-check-girl elegance and cheeriness. These Top 10 Art Deco New York City apartment buildings just dance in the dark, with a wriggle here and a high-kick there, doing the skyscraper swoon.

For those aficionados of New York City real estate, the Holy Grail is in a building that dramatically changed a neighborhood, inspiring others to construct new edifices to partake in the pioneer's splendiferous aura of discovery and influence, and presumably riches. These heroic structures, of course, need not be architectural masterpieces, nor provide the developers with pots of gold. They simply must be pathfinders, redefining and rearranging boundaries. In New York City, many actually happened to be wonderful buildings that would have sparkled anywhere.

All of sudden, out of nowhere, New York City is getting some really tall buildings with apartments. We're not talking great architecture, but feet, lots and lots of feet, piled high. We're flirting with 1,000 feet. A little less than the Chrysler Building, but still impressive and notable. That's the "vicinity" that Extell aimed for at One57 across from Carnegie Hall between Seventh and Sixth Avenues on 57th Street and that Hines Interests is contemplating just to the west of the Museum of Modern Art in its revised plans. These stupendous heights, by New York standards, result from merging together a few zoning lots, a common practice. We'll be sure to update this list regularly as the city experiences something of an apartment building height-race.

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